Twilight of the Godlings

The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings

Francis Young

Cambridge University Press 2023

Hb, 365pp, £30, ISBN 9781009330367

“Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?” asks the centurion in

Puck of Pook’s Hill.

Two centuries earlier, John Aubrey, like Rudyard Kipling, had identified Robin Goodfellow as a faun; and long before that, cultists in fourth-century Thetford gathered to honour Faunus, spirit of the wood and wild.

So maybe Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England, really does have a genealogy stretching back to Roman times.

Francis Young thinks so. A meticulous researcher, he knows that claims for folklore’s longue durée were often made on little or no evidence, but feels we could usefully return to the old question of British fairy origins.

Put simply, Shakespeare expected instant comprehension when he put a supernatural race on stage with their king and queen.

Some are beautiful and some ugly, some monstrous and some small; they steal children, they take lovers; they have powers over fate and destiny.

How had it become so easy for his contemporaries to believe in this parallel magical race?

Though “fairy” is itself a 14th-century word, it replaced other terms for the minor deities of nature and fate that Young conveniently calls godlings.

He lines up four suspects for the origin of this mythology.

There is the Roman, with his fauns, nymphs, fates and genii;

the Germanic settler with his charm-lore of elves, dwarfs and pucks; the mediaeval churchman, learned in the ways of incubi and

sylvani; and finally the mediaeval romancer with his tales of Faerie.

He, at least, can be easily dismissed: mediaeval people knew that fiction was fiction, and a folkloresque character like Morgan le Fay need not tell us any more about real fairies than Dumbledore does about real magicians.

A fluent Latinist, Young traces the unwitting creativity through which mediaeval clerics matched texts from Jerome and Augustine with terms inherited from the vernacular to form new imaginative worlds.

There are no Celts among his suspects: of course the New Age Celtic industry has discredited this line of thought, but still, there is no denying that Irish storytellers had legends of a parallel race, and folktales of abduction, several centuries before anyone else; and in Ireland, unlike Britain and the Continent, written romance was continuous with actual belief.

To support his views on origins, Young tackles some of the trickiest issues of folkloristics: survival, borrowing, fusion and invention.

His chapter on religion and belief in post-Roman Britain is one of the best treatments available for this challenging period.

It doesn’t, in the end, tell us much about godlings; but these are five centuries in which we know next to nothing about anything, so extracting a lucid history is a triumph in itself.

This is the consequence of a book that gives equal weight to all periods from AD 50 to 1500: the narrative gathers pace in the last two chapters, on the early and late Middle Ages, because here is the direct evidence for what people said and thought.

Be prepared for long passages where Young name-checks more scholars in fairy studies than fairies themselves, a sort of glass bead game in which secondary sources are poised, weighed and arranged, perhaps at the expense of the original beliefs and experiences.

To ask about fairy beginnings is to reject the possibility that they were always there: as if there was once a time when people did not encounter the supernatural, and then someone – which of the suspects? – went and made it all up.

Twilight of the Godlings has already achieved a deserved celebrity: people cite it as the goto book for anyone who wants to know where fairies come from.

But the fairies of King Orfeo

are not those of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and they are not those of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Traditional performances do not offer us snapshots of a godling population at different stages of development; each age has its own Faerie, a new nexus of beliefs in the network of supernatural imagination.

Folklore has no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end, even if we can trace a history for the themes that crisscross it over time – gold that turns to leaves, wizened faces in cradles, centuries that pass in a night.

This book brings impressive contemporary scholarship to bear on a topic that preoccupied yesterday’s folklorists. But it may be looking for the answer to a question that does not exist. Jeremy Harte

★★★